A Concise History of the Crusades

Thomas Madden’s A Concise History of the Crusades is a good introduction to the subject. He describes each crusade from a European perspective, focusing on the narrative of what happened. He omits the Christian conquest of Spain, though he does discuss the Albigensian Crusade against French heretics. He explains the rise and fall of the crusader states in the Middle East and the evolution of the major crusading orders, such as the Knights Templar.

Many of the crusaders were incredibly inept, with the leaders squabbling among themselves and with Christian armies launching foolhardy attacks, assuming that God’s grace was all they needed for victory. It’s amazing the First Crusade was so successful, managing to capture a large region including Antioch and Jerusalem. Any victories by the Christians or Muslims could generally be attributed to disarray on the other side. Madden draws a coherent picture of some complex historical events I knew little about.

The (mis)Behavior of Markets

The (mis)Behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward presents a non-conventional way of understanding the stock market and other financial exchanges. Benoit Mandelbrot, the primary author, developed the concept of fractals, a mathematical constructs that he and others have found useful in many fields. His co-author, Richard Hudson, was an editor and writer of the Wall Street Journal for decades.

They start by describing the established financial concepts: the efficient market, Capital Asset Pricing Model, Modern Portfolio Theory, and Black-Scholes formula for option pricing. They then point out the weaknesses of those theories. The most significant weakness is that large price fluctuations, such as the stock market drop in 1987, happen far more frequently than the standard theories would predict. Real financial markets don’t have bell curve statistical variations, which underlies the techniques people learn in business school.

The book outlines a non-standard approach based on fractals. The authors avoid mathematical formulism, and instead illustrate those ideas with descriptions and graphs. They focus on the lives of the major innovators and a high-level description of their research. That approach keeps the book accessible, though I can’t judge what a less mathematically inclined reader would think.

The (mis)Behavior of Markets would appeal to people who are interested in both finance and mathematics. Mandelbrot and Hudson did a good job of popularizing a complex topic. I would have appreciated a more mathematical treatment, but doing so would have lost most of the potential audience.

The Language Police

In The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, Diane Ravitch complains about restrictions on public school textbooks and standardized tests. Ravitch provides numerous examples of the detailed rules limiting the material and phrasing that can appear. In response to demands from activists on the left and on the right, textbooks are bland, literature is censured, and historical depictions are inaccurate.

Some requests sound reasonable, such as textbook depictions that reflect the gender and racial makeup of the population. However, many of the limitations go to ridiculous extremes. Almost all literature from before 1970 is unacceptable because it contains images or phrases that students aren’t supposed to see. History books present all societies in a positive light, regardless of what those societies did. Meanwhile, the right objects to material they claim promotes secular humanism, magic, evolution, feminism, and other topics.

The Language Police makes its case, but it felt like an article’s worth of material stretched out into a book. The long lists of censored passages, textbook guidelines, state reading material, and other topics became quite repetitive. Ravitch focused almost exclusively on English and history classes. Her discussion of standardized tests displayed a weak understanding of statistics, and who really cares whether essays on tests are dull? Ravitch was an assistant secretary in the Bush Sr. administration, which made me a little skeptical of her perspective on history texts.

The Language Police was a quick read and involves a little-discussed issue affecting millions of school children. Though it had some faults, it’s probably the best treatment of the subject.

Moral Politics

In Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservative Think, George Lakoff provides the conceptual underpinnings for the ideas he summarizes in Don’t Think of An Elephant. As a result, Moral Politics is far more coherent and convincing. Lakoff presents a cognitive science theory of the metaphors that liberals and conservatives apply when making moral judgments, which in turn determine their political stands.

As Lakoff sees it, conservatives have a Strict Father model of morality that emphasizes obedience to authority, right vs. wrong, rewards & punishments, and moral strength. Liberals follow a Nurturant Parent model focusing on empathy, compassion, social ties, and fair distribution. These family models lead to specific political views because parenting is a common metaphor for government.

These different moral models explain conservative beliefs more cogently than any explanation I’ve heard before. As a nurturant liberal, conservative opposition to basic social programs has always been incomprehensible to me, since the Republicans I’ve met haven’t been particularly cruel or selfish. From my perspective, ensuring that everyone’s physical needs are met is a clear moral imperative. However, Strict Father morality opposes social programs because it values self-discipline, rewards being earned, avoiding coddling, and moral strength arising from self-reliance.

Lakoff applies his models to explain liberal and conservative views on a wide variety of issues. He examines liberal and conservative rhetoric to demonstrate why liberal arguments don’t register with conservatives. Lakoff’s models do an impressive job of explaining events that occurred after Moral Politics was originally published in 1996, such as the Clinton impeachment and W’s Presidency.

I strongly recommend the book to anyone interested in current events. Though I had feared it would be an abstract academic tome, it was actually quite readable. Lakoff gets a little repetitive at times, but that’s not a big deal. Democrats need to internalize these ideas to generate a more effective message, as Republicans already have.

Medical bankrupcy despite health insurace

The Nation has a depressing story about the many middle-class people who take large debts, and often end up in bankrupcy, in order to pay their medical bills. Many of those people have health insurance, but the deductables and co-payments are massive.

It's depressing, and it's one more reason why this country needs single-payer health care.

Secret Love

The main reason I read Secret Love was because its author, Bart Schneider, is my uncle. It’s the first novel I’ve seen that was written by an acquaintance, letting me wonder how much the protagonist and his father are based on my uncle and grandfather. The story takes place in San Francisco in the mid-1960’s, presenting an image of what the city looked like before Vietnam-era protests, the gay-rights movement, and gentrification.

The title refers to the romance between Jake, a Jewish civil-rights activist attorney, and Nisa, a young mulatto actress. Their relationship is hindered by Jake’s desire to keep it secret from his father, children, and public society. Two gay characters, one black and one white, are also entangled in the story.

The characters are distinctive but believable, though they’re all a bit too articulate and Jake sometimes seems too good to be true. Issues like race, religion, and homosexuality percolate throughout the narrative without it becoming preachy. You end up caring about the characters, and the San Francisco atmosphere is an added bonus to anyone familiar with the city.

I enjoyed the storytelling and images of Secret Love, for reasons besides my bias from knowing the author.

The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing

In The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing: The Experience and Treatment of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Judith Rapoport shines light on that puzzling disorder. People with OCD feel compelled to wash themselves for hours each day, go back repeatedly to check whether they accidentally hit someone with their car, and engage in other bizarre behavior that totally disrupts their lives.

The book includes self-descriptions by patients and accounts of parents whose children have OCD. A majority of the book consists of case studies of various OCD sufferers. As Rapoport explains, certain new drugs can lessen or alleviate OCD for many, but not all, patients. Behavioral therapy can sometimes help, but other psychological approaches have had no luck in addressing the disorder.

Though millions of Americans have OCD, most are secretive about it, and until recently the psychological community knew little about it. In fact, until a few decades ago the Catholic Church, concerned with the obsessive religious behavior called scrupulosity, had a better understanding than the psychologists. Rapoport speculates about its causes, noting that many animals have patterns of grooming and searching for danger, which resemble the cleaning and checking patterns of OCD.

The case studies and observations held my attention and avoided the psychobabble of some psychology books. Though none of my acquaintances, as far I know, have OCD, reading about the mental disorder raises questions about human nature. How much control do we have over our actions and desires?

Stiff

In Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach tells you everything you ever wanted to know about dead bodies. She provides an eyewitness account of places that few visit, observing what people do to cadavers and how they cope with the reality of dealing with corpses.

She starts with an eerie scene in which a roomful of plastic surgeons practice their craft on decapitated heads sitting in pots. She goes on to describe the sordid practice of body snatching for dissection, which was common in past centuries when people were horrified at the prospect of their bodies being desecrated. Researchers watch how bodies decay to gain raw data for forensics. Experiments with human crash test dummies improve automobile safety. Organs are harvested from bodies that are brain-dead, but still have a beating heart. Finally, Roach examines exotic topics like crucifixion studies, head transplants, cannibalism, and using human bodies as compost.

While I was aware of most of the topics Roach covers, it’s interesting to read a first-hand account of what happens in, say, a med school anatomy lab. Roach finds a reasonable way to balance respect for the dead, the grisliness of corpses, and natural curiosity about a taboo topic. Stiff is a quick read, and it isn’t as unsettling as I had feared. Some parts were better than others, but overall I’d recommend the book to anyone who doesn't get queasy too easily.

A Distant Mirror

Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century is a vivid portrayal of a nasty century of events. The century’s calamities include the Hundred Years War, the Black Plague, the papal schism, pillaging mercenaries, and popular revolts. Tuchman focuses on France and French involvement in the surrounding area.

The book often went into too much detail, such as the ten-page description of the pageantry associated with the Holy Roman Emperor’s visit to Paris in 1387-8. Sometimes I enjoyed the rich images Tuchman conjures up, while at other times it became monotonous. I would have preferred a less detailed account.

The leadership and the whole approach of chivalry were amazingly dysfunctional. The aristocracy lived in incredible opulence while a bulk of the population struggled to get by. The various powers launched a series of ill-conceived and pointless wars, in which the knights were more concerned with glory than in actually achieving their objectives. And the Church was just as flawed as the secular institutions.

I had mixed feelings about A Distant Mirror. Tuchman captures what it was like to live in the chaos of the late Middle Ages, along with vibrant characterizations of the major figures of the time. However, the various campaigns, events, and personages were repetitive, and I had to push myself to complete the book.